COVID stupidity in MA

This thread is timely: on a lark pending me wrapping up work early, I made a reservation at Trillium Canton for late this afternoon. Received a call a half hour ago that they have to shut down the patio for the day because a worker with their pop-up food vendor tested positive for Covid. Although that worker was stationed at the restaurant and not onsite, the whole patio is being shut down (still to-go drive up beer available the rest of the day I believe), deep cleaning and rapid testing done by the food workers and staff in the hopes they can reopen tomorrow.

There's thousands of dollars in business on a Friday night gone because a food vendor needed to be onsite. Could have been a crushing loss for a smaller brewery than Trillium who only had a vendor onsite because they HAD to. (Maybe Trillium would have had a food vendor present even if voluntary, but who knows.)

 

Pretty ironic.

Am I using that correctly? I can never tell.

 

i don't think he's talking about the coincidence of that guy going today, but the irony of bars/breweries being corona-safe if they serve food. this "necessary" food vendor person brought the rona with them.

 

Oh sorry- yup that is definitely irony-my bad!

 

Not ignoring him at Trillium.

 

I can confirm a similar experience, though this location didn't even have a menu on the table.

 

Name names. Every brewery in the state is about to be closed and hundreds of servers/bartenders are going to go back on unemployment because of assholes like this. They give the good ones a bad name and sweeping rules are going to shut all breweries down because of this bullshit. So name names. We deserve to know who to blame when 100s of us are about to lose our income.

 

The New England Cold Brew haze bro’s were just better in Obama

 

I agree ... this is very disconcerting. I'm beyond pissed that I've had to jump through even more hoops to remain open as if what we weren't already doing wasn't safe enough (it was, btw). The few bad apples are what is causing everyone else to have to go well beyond what they should have to in order to remain open and keep their staff employed. I'm not below reporting them at this point as its threatening the livelihood of my employees as well as my business. It's one thing when you ignore the rules and it risks only your business... it's another when you do it and it threatens an entire industry. That's just being a selfish asshole.

 

But what I don’t understand is why restaurants don’t have to follow these same rules? My wife and I went out last night to a restaurant and ordered 2 drinks each before we ordered food. No one said that we had to order food first. No consistency, nonsense rule.

 

This is a patently false. Get your facts straight

 

Um, I think restaurants assume that you are going to get food if you go to one. However, it sounds like that they shouldn't be serving drinks unless food is ordered at the same time or before. I don't know. This whole thing is maddening. It's so poorly thought out without getting stakeholders to the table or listening to those stakeholders.

FWIW when I was in NYC, the waitress wouldn't bring my Allagash White until we ordered food.

 

Is it obvious?! Everyone speculates its the MRA whispering in Charlie's ear but do we know for sure? The MBG fought hard in May to allow tap rooms to be classified as restaurants and the governor listened then. Why would they further state a case when they thought everything was settled? The MBG is very actively involved with the state government and even they were caught off guard with this new ruling so it was clearly done without any sort of consultation of stakeholders.

The point of my reply was that there are businesses not playing by the rules... those are the ones that should bear the brunt of any restrictions related to their lack of adherence to the mandates. The governor could have launched a warning shot over the bow and used the new powers granted to local police and the ABCC and gone after those businesses. Instead, he chose to take a unilateral approach which is going to unfortunately harm alot of good businesses that were playing by the rules and ultimately it is going to cost employees their jobs. I would think the governor would want to avoid putting any more people on unemployment right now but I'm not sure that factored into his decision.

 

What was “playing by the rules” before? Because every place I went to before Baker tightened the rules this past Tuesday didn’t require me to order food while ordering drinks (this is both restaurants and breweries).

 

Up until last week ordering food was not a requirement. That was added as a proxy to reduce "bar" behavior. However, making sure guests were seated and socially distant was. So was eliminating service at the bar. As well, as preventing congregating in and outside ones business. Those are the items that some chose to ignore/failed to control.

 

Right, i see it as a way to avoid the “hey we have hot pockets if you want em, you don’t really need to order them, we are a restaurant” things that were happening. I think you have a point about actively pursuing the violators but in this type of environment I can see why it was just a unilateral escalation.

 

Oakholm in Brookfield got doubly screwed.
They are a farm brewery that opened this year with a very big outdoor space. They have food trucks and live music Fri-Sun. They were following all regulations and then some, even requiring masks when not seated in spite of the fact that everything was outside and distanced. You could even set up your own spot on the lawn away from the tables.
Now, along with the new state regulation of having to order food first, the town of Brookfield cut their capacity to 50 people in the outdoor space including staff and everyone has to be at a table without the freedom to walk around the property regardless of the distancing.
It is probably a big ask, especially for bigger towns and cities, but couldn't places like this be allowed to demonstrate the safety level of their specific operations and be given or denied approval based on that?

 

To my knowledge CT does not require a food purchase (at least the two breweries I've been to didn't)